Washington: Amid reports that Pakistan gave China access to the wreckage of a US stealth chopper destroyed in the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a noted American expert has said that Islamabad is not an ally of the United States as it does not share same strategic goals.

"The administration is starting to wise up to the fact that Pakistan does not share US strategic goals in the region," Lisa Curtis of The Heritage Foundation said.

"Initially, the Obama administration believed it could forge a strategic partnership with Pakistan and work jointly toward counter-terrorism objectives. However, following the bin Laden raid, there appears to be much less faith in this strategy within the administration," she said.

Curtis said there was always a great deal of concern that the Pakistanis would allow the Chinese access to the downed helicopter.

"China has been Pakistan's 'all-weather' friend for the last 50 years, and Islamabad would likely relish an opportunity to help the Chinese by providing them information on sensitive US military technology," she noted.

"China, after all, was willing to break international rules for Pakistan by providing it ballistic missile technology and nuclear know-how during the 1980s–1990s. More recently, China has agreed to provide Pakistan with two new civilian nuclear reactors, despite (knowing) that such transfers would violate the rules of the Nuclear Supplier's Group, an organisation China joined in 2004," she said.

The Pakistanis had even hinted to the US shortly after the bin Laden raid that that they would "consider showing the Chinese the downed helicopter," Curtis said.

"So, if Pakistani officials did indeed give the Chinese access to the aircraft, it should hardly come as a surprise to anyone," she said.

"It would merely constitute one more reason the US needs to question whether it should be sending large amounts of security aid to a country that is increasingly taking a defiant posture toward the US," she said.

Curtis said now the Obama administration is keeping a private scorecard of Pakistani actions to root out terrorism, and is conditioning future US security aid to Pakistan on it meeting certain counter-terrorism and other benchmarks.

The concept of conditioning US security aid to Pakistan is long overdue, she said.